The final makeover comes 10 years after the IRA declared a cease-fire on August 29, 1994. At the time there were gaping contradictions in the republican position and these are only now being tackled. There were victory celebrations on the street and, as Anthony McIntyre, a former republican prisoner has noted, the IRA told its supporters the war had been won but resolutely refused to tell unionists that it was over.
Gerry Adams geared up Sinn Fein assembly members for the cost of clearing up these sorts of ambiguities at a recent meeting in Monaghan. He told them that up to a third of the party membership could walk away when the transformation was complete. Vigilantes are on the way out. Support for police and sensitivity to unionism are on the way in.
Conor Lenihan, the Fianna Fail TD, spelled out what was needed when he said of Sinn Fein: “That’s something people have to focus on now — how and in what circumstances will they be admitted to power in the republic.” His list of requirements wasn’t that different to Peter Robinson’s.
The IRA would have to go, there would have to be an end to illegality and there would have to be complete decommissioning of paramilitary weapons.
Last week the wind of change was felt in Antrim’s sprawling Rathenraw estate when Gerry Murray, former IRA prisoner and chairman of the local community association, was visited by police. They warned him that republicans were preparing to put him out of his home.
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Earlier, he had had a brush with Martin Meehan, another former prisoner and now a Sinn Fein councillor. He had branded Murray a “Fagin-type character who uses young people to create havoc and do his dirty work for him”. Meehan had promised that the “republican movement” would “deal with” him.
Murray’s community association is accused by Sinn Fein of pressurising the family of an alleged drug dealer out of the area.
Murray finds it all a bit hard to understand. Pressurising those suspected of distributing drugs and other “anti-social activities” used to be supported by Sinn Fein. The party once presented it as a way of empowering local communities but now it’s regarded as a bit of an embarrassment.
A former bomb maker, Murray was jailed for attempting to blow up oil tanks at Belfast City airport and freed under the Good Friday agreement. “When we were briefed on it in prison we were told Sinn Fein were only going into Stormont to wreck it, not to work the system,” he recalls.
Even so he only resigned from Sinn Fein in May and says he would still vote for the party. He is opposed to the dissidents who he sees as “a bit of joke”. He says: “I’m not doing anything different than what I did when I was in Sinn Fein.”
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“I was never an elected representative. I never stood. I preferred to do the dirty work and get my hands dirty on the ground and allow the politicians to get the credit for it.”
Outing drug dealers is not the only traditional republican activity to become an embarrassment. Meehan once boasted that the British Army “squealed like pigs” when he opened fire on them. Antrim Sinn Fein now opposes of provocative displays of tricolours at interface areas.
One tricolour on the Graystone Road was removed with Sinn Fein approval. Meehan meets regularly with Ken Wilkinson, the local representative of the PUP, the political wing of the UVF, to try and iron out difficulties at the interface.
You don’t have to go back many years to trace Sinn Fein’s rise to power on the backs of communities that were encouraged to take the law into their own hands. That was how Christy Burke won Sinn Fein’s first seat on Dublin city council, elected by a community ravaged by drugs. It was part and parcel of Sinn Fein’s policy of social control in working class areas of Northern Ireland.
In some areas, such as Poleglass on the edges of West Belfast, the IRA is still involved in punishments, but the policy of conflict is gradually being eased out as the party eases itself into the mainstream. Those who are still carrying out the attacks may yet find themsleves disowned.
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The IRA and Sinn Fein encouraged conflicts, often around Orange marches, to keep grass-roots activists occupied and to provide an alternative focus to the terrorist campaign.
But like Dr Frankenstein, Sinn Fein is disowning the monster it created. It was not so long ago that IRA activists, including Brian Gillen who is now a member of the Army Council, turned up regularly at meetings of nationalist residents groups to ensure a sufficient protest against Orange marches. In 1995, moderate residents in areas like the Lower Ormeau Road complained of intimidation by IRA members and of being shouted down at meetings.
This July 12, things had changed. Gillen, Gerry Kelly, a former bomber turned Sinn Fein politician, and Bobby Storey, the IRA director of intelligence, were among the senior IRA figures who urged nationalists to allow an Orange parade march past Ardoyne shops in north Belfast. Kelly, who once bombed the Old Bailey and was caught smuggling explosives from Holland, even weighed in to save a paratrooper who was surrounded by a crowd of militant nationalists. Kelly took a beating from some youths for his trouble, as he stood between the injured soldier and the angry crowd. Kelly sustained a broken wrist in the endeavour and was credited with saving the soldier’s life. He was later presented with a watch at Ardoyne Feile for his peace-keeping efforts. Many locals, while not exactly disapproving of Kelly’s action, appreciated the irony. Jean McConville, the mother of twins, was abducted, branded an informer and murdered by the IRA after she comforted a wounded British soldier.
It is not the first time that republicans have turned on activities that it once supported. A former Belfast joyrider, now a respectable middle-aged man, recently told me how he had been encouraged into car theft by the IRA, which needed vehicles for barricades and a general atmosphere of lawlessness during the August anti-internment protests. They created a youth culture that later became surplus to the IRA’s requirements. It ended up being suppressed violently.
The former joyrider, who did not wish to be identified, still suffers pain after being beaten to a pulp and having all his limbs broken in his early twenties.
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His attackers were led by a man who is now a well-known public figure who speaks frequently and publicly on civil liberties issues. Unlike Paddy Murray, who hadn’t kneecapped anybody, this sadistic thug has managed to make himself part of the new dispensation.